No Security Against Machine Consciousness
There is no security … against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. … May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become?
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Context: From the Erewhonian treatise that persuaded the country to destroy its machines.
Not in a duel yet
Source: Chapter XXIII: The Book of the Machines